I agree this was a great CPU. My best friend bought the P90 shortly after its release and I was so jealous (I only had a 486DX2-66 at that time).

And it even survived the bad press due to the FDIV bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

I see you have the 'gold cap' version, at first it looks like a P60 or 66, which was IMO only a stepping stone to a more mature platform, socket 5.

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2023-11-28, 18:49:

This is the CPU that Forced Apple to Switch to the Intel CPU because Apple was losing sales and wanted support from the PC and UNIX community and industries.

Um, not arguing the merits of the Pentium architecture...but that's a bit of a stretch seeing as Apple didn't switch to Intel processors until 2006. That was largely to do with PowerPC chips not being efficient enough to provide a sufficient balance of power draw/compute power in mobile devices.

Ironically enough, this is also precisely what drove Apple to develop their own silicon and ditch Intel just a few years back.
Still that's a cool CPU.

We had a totally different pace in the technology evolution around 1995-1997 compared to today.

I would say that in 1997 most Pentium 90-owners were thinking about upgrading to a MMX or even a Pentium II.

What really made a huge difference was the Pentium Pro that lived on for many years more in Pentium II and 3 and even later models that didn't get infected with the Netburst plague.

Yes, Computers that came with the Pentium 90 and 100 were many including
HP Netservers
Compaq servers
HP Vectra
IBM Desktop
Dell Optiplex
Etc…..

The pentium 90 would have been considered obsolete by 97. It was a different era, things were moving very very fast.

By 1997, there was definitely a move to Pentium MMX processors. Games in 1997 were starting to list the P90 as minimum system requirements or in some cases (e.g. Jane's Longbow 2) a P90 would have been below minimum requirements.

That said, having just built a machine with a Pentium 90, it does feel like a processor ahead of its time. For games in 1994 and 1995 that could do just fine on a 486, in some cases the Pentium was too fast.

We used the Pentium 90 & 100 up until 1998 but it performed fine in a computer classroom network environment running Win-NT 4.0 Server, Novell Server, Linux, x86 UNIX, HP Openview, Oracle database, and many other programs and applications.
We use to stress test these computers over the network with large file transfers and they did not Choke or Crash. They held up pretty good.
I think we had 32mb of ram running Win NT 4.0 Server.
We would use One computer to perform Network installs to all the classrooms full of computers.
You could install an entire classroom of 30 computers in 5 minutes over the network.
You could install multiple classrooms at one time using this pentium 100 CPU.
We had everything automated and could install any OS with Applications in minutes with just 3 clicks of the mouse.
We had many hard drive images that we could roll out in minutes.

But for gaming I think I will just build a basic computer with the most common components for that era and for best game compatibility an performance.

Okay, Maybe the Pentium 133 or 150 megahertz would have performed better in 1997 but I am going to use the Pentium 90 because I like the look of the Gold cap and I think this is where the Pentium CPU began it’s dominance and started to show its potential in computer processing.

Are you planning on doing a complete period-correct build for 1994 (e.g. video card, RAM, etc.)? Or mixing and matching newer components with the Pentium 90?

Its going to be a Win95 build with Win95 era hardware pre 1998

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2023-12-01, 08:46:

Okay, Maybe the Pentium 133 or 150 megahertz would have performed better in 1997 but I am going to use the Pentium 90 because I like the look of the Gold cap and I think this is where the Pentium CPU began it’s dominance and started to show its potential in computer processing.

There are goldcap 100's also 😉 but yes, 90 was the big boom for Pentium though 75 probably was what opened up for mainstream ...

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-12-01, 17:15:

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2023-12-01, 08:46:

Okay, Maybe the Pentium 133 or 150 megahertz would have performed better in 1997 but I am going to use the Pentium 90 because I like the look of the Gold cap and I think this is where the Pentium CPU began it’s dominance and started to show its potential in computer processing.

There are goldcap 100's also 😉 but yes, 90 was the big boom for Pentium though 75 probably was what opened up for mainstream ...

Even though the p60 had an extraordinarily short retail life, its surprising that Intel still had price per 1000 units into 1996 for p60/66 and you could still buy the p60 new as an entry level system at that point.

It was theoretically the only entry level Pentium during the strange time that the p90 was launched but the p75 wasn’t available .
When the p75 did actually launch there was a lot of benchmarking discussion about how a p66 with one of the better chipset/cache configurations actually outperformed the p75 due to bus speed and pci bus performance.

I honestly considered a bare bones p60 out of the computer shopper the same time I ended up buying a 5x86 instead.

Performance and price wise the $399 5x86 system was configured so much better in every way compared to the $399 p60 and good lord did p75 have a big price jump at that point for essentially the same configuration of system.

Yeah you're thinking this? https://dependency-injection.com/pentium-66-m … -mhz-shoot-out/

If actually forgot that the 90 launched before the 75. But that kinda supports the theory that the 75 was the market penetration part ...

I've seen a lot of Gateway and Packard Bell P75s in my life so it's definitely that setting the foothold, but only a little later when they were rather old (late 95-96) and Pentium was a relative unobtanium luxury CPU with little use gains over a well-tuned 486/5x86 before that point and Cyrix were already making shockwaves with their pricing and their 686 stuff the much faster and actually-used-professionally Pentium Pro borrowed.

Yeah the press were somewhat right in that P75 didn't really show it's performance advantage until pentium code became ubiquitous a couple of years later. So in 1995 they were saying it made sense to cling to the fastest of the 486 platform. I listened and ultimately got about P90 level performance out of the 5x86 on 60x2, but had I realised I would have had to hold onto that machine until late 99, I might have stretched for the P75, which wasn't that high a stretch, but I was really put off by the talk of how crappy the 50mhz bus was. What information was lacking in late 95 going into 96 was the tremendous yields intel must have been getting by then. Because most B step 75s I've tried since will do 100-120 comfortably, and most C steps will do 133-150 comfortably, and even a few do a hot and bothered 166 on 2x83. I would have been very happy if I found out I was just a jumper setting away from 100+. Then also the Cyrix and AMD competition were forcing prices down such that I might have been able to put a 200mhz class chip in the board very cheaply a year or two later.

I have at present two gold top 90s one bugged, one not. If I find the Siemens Nixdorf scenic motherboard I once had I might set that up as the classic early socket 5 machine. it was a bit of a weird LPXish one but had most stuff onboard. I believe it may have only liked the original (practically not really a) multiplier setting scheme hence seemed dead when I tried it with a later Pentium, so I might have impatiently disposed of it. Though now, knowing I have very old and middling old socket 5 to try, I think it might be easily reanimated. I maybe have a spare FX board instead I could go that way with, but if I don't have another earlier board, I might be doing that as a P200 release date period system.

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-12-01, 20:28:

Yeah you're thinking this? https://dependency-injection.com/pentium-66-m … -mhz-shoot-out/

If actually forgot that the 90 launched before the 75. But that kinda supports the theory that the 75 was the market penetration part ...

That and the usenet had a lot of hearsay . (Seems like a magazine had commentary on it also)
It took Close to 9 months between the p90 and the p75 launch, the boards for socket 5 were still meh and it took a good long while before the p75 and its socket 5 motherboards got downright cheap enough for most to own.

It seems like even when I bought my very early $399 5x86 mini-tower system that p75 in same specs was still at least +$200 with many barebones still being twice as much

Had I known how overclockable p75 was I might have taken the plunge anyway but back then god help you on getting one of the decent motherboards that weren’t gimped in some way or just extremely slow. Hardly any information back then on the differences in the cheap prepackaged boards you got in a generic minitower. Nobody actually spelled out which model of generic board you got and the cache, chipset, voltage configuration and multiplier specs on a given board were a surprise after you bought it.

Totally different time.

Most of my friends had 486's till around 98-99. Hardware was so expensive and became obsolete so quick it was impossible to keep up.
Internet and office work side of computing was good enough. Gaming is where we became stuck and I grew to hate the message "Pentium Required" when trying to run games from demo disk.

Never really got many sub 200Mhz machines in garage sales, etc. Typically it was 486 and below or P200 and higher.

The Pentium architecture got a pretty big boost with hand coded software designed to use it, namely Quake.
But the trend didn't end there.
Still that game was a pretty big catalyst for a lot of enthusiasts to finally swear off their 486 and 486 derivatives from Cyrix and the like.